November 25, 2008

...every so often, I catch glimpses of former players, especially those from 2004, and it warms my heart. This is especially true when the former player is DAVE ROBERTS.

I get ESPN: the Magazine for some reason (and I mean that--I'm not sure if it was piggybacked on a gift subscription I got to SI, but I seriously have no idea why it started showing up at my house), and in the most recent issue they asked pro athletes what was on their Christmas wish list. Most of the athletes listed something either nearly or totally unattainable, such as a World Series ring.

Toward the bottom of the magazine sidebar was a familiar name: "DAVE ROBERTS, Giants LF." And this is what he said:

I'd love a recurring role on The Young and the Restless. I'm man enough to admit it.

July 12, 2008

When I was 10 years old, my parents began the family summer tradition of loading us into a minivan and driving across the Midwest for two weeks. At the end of that first trip, we stopped off in Cooperstown for a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame that would be memorable for all the wrong reasons.

This stop, like an ill-fated detour to South Bend, Indiana to tour the legendary football field of Notre Dame, was mostly for my father's benefit, and what little he derived was filtered through an atmosphere thick with whining from me and my younger sister. We were tired, we were bored, it had been two weeks of 10, 12 and 14 hour drives as cornfields flashed by; we were right on the cusp of getting home and this pause to tour a baseball museum was not welcome.

Or, at least, that's what I imagine was going through our heads. Honestly, though I have no doubt that my father's remembrances are accurate, what I remember most about the Hall of Fame visit was an exhibit about Roger Clemens' first 20 strikeout game (the second had yet to happen). I also remember staring at a huge picture of a player sliding in to a base, surrounded by a violent tsunami of dirt, above which an umpire spread his black wings, wide as a condor's: Safe!

Fast-forward 18 years to last Sunday. It was an irony not lost on any of us in my family that my birthday gift from my parents was being treated to the Baseball as America exhibit at Boston's Museum of Science, featuring a traveling collection from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This time around, it was fascinating. From an Abner Doubleday baseball to a hands-on pitching cage, a mid-sized exhibit hall at the museum had been turned into a complex maze of artifacts and interactive displays. You could test out different pitch grips on a set of mounted baseballs, or heft a set of four bats tethered to a wall, each of them built to replicate the actual bat of a great hitter. I liked Babe Ruth's bat the best--it had a little heft to it, but was still light enough to manipulate easily. It felt balanced.

The exhibit wound its way around a temporary wall, so you couldn't see one end of it from the other. Thus it wasn't until the very end of an hour and a half spent mooning over ancient baseball cards, antique seats from long-dead ballparks that look just like the grandstand seats at Fenway (only bigger), and old-school ads featuring a young Roger Clemens, that I rounded the last corner and saw what would be the high point of the exhibit for me: a pitching machine.

It was set up at the end of a 60-foot 6-inch cage, the receiving end of which had a catcher's mask embedded in fiberglass. A sign encouraged you to stick your face in the mask, to "see what a Major League catcher sees." The ball looked like a sinking fastball to me, and another person watching the machine said it was coming in at 90 miles an hour, but I never saw where that speed was posted.

The balls being launched by the machine were not actual baseballs--they looked more like oversized golf balls to me. They didn't finish with the sounds I'm used to hearing from a real baseball--the pop into the catcher's mitt, and up close, the hum of the seams through the air. Instead, these mechanically-fired sinking fastballs crashed and richocheted like missiles into netting in front of the catcher's mask, rolled around on an inclined plane designed to funnel them into a tube, and then shuttled back along that tube to re-load the machine.

But stick your face in that catcher's mask, and you were still in for a treat. At least, if you're me. You heard the hiss of the hydraulics setting, and then the muzzle of the machine glowed green for a second. After that warning, the ball was incoming, looming large through the mesh of the mask after just a split second. It reminded me of what I've heard said about Josh Beckett's pitches at Fenway--the ball seemed to be coming in faster than the layman's brain suggests is possible. (Although Josh throws five to seven miles an hour faster than the machine.)

The true moment of Zen for me was when I finally tore myself away from the catcher's mask and walked to the other end of the cage, to look at the machine itself. It was about seven or eight feet tall from base to the uppermost point of the hydraulic mechanism, part of which was comprised of a cannister about a foot in diameter, and a four or five-foot long muzzle that looked like it would have been at home mounted on the front of an Abrams tank.

All this to recreate what's normally accomplished with only an arm, a brain and a body.

***

I was so caught up in the pitching machine that I almost missed the other highlight of the exhibit. I had originally stuck to one side, thinking we would loop back around and I'd catch the other side on the way back. That turned out not to be the case by the time I got to the pitching machine, which was just before the gift shop and exit. At the last minute I decided to go back and just glance at the things I'd missed quickly, more out of my usual weird brand of compulsive perfectionism than anything else.

This time, it turned out to be an asset--what I would have missed had I not gone back was nothing less than the Bloody Sock itself, which was mounted at the center of one case along the wall I'd skipped.

Other people in the group of family and friends I was with had heard the Sock would be a part of the exhibit, but I hadn't. It even took me a few minutes of reading the tiny plaques next to Clay Buccholz's hat and David Ortiz's jersey surrounding it before I looked, and double-taked, and realized what I was looking at.

For one thing, I wasn't prepared for how big it was. It was easily three or four times the size of any sock I've ever encountered. I guess there's a reason Pesky calls Schilling "Big'un."

And, of course, there was the blood. It was clearly blood, not something I've ever not believed, but it helped to finally see it with my own eyes.

All I can say is, it would've taken a world-class painter to create the Sock artificially. Actually, there would have to have been two socks, to be accurate, one with bright red markings worn during the actual game, and this one, with the same stains in the same place but dried to maroon and brown, with varying degrees of depth to the stain. You know, as if someone bled into it through various apertures on the uneven surface of an ankle bone, to varying degrees of saturation.

Do I believe in a vast Right-Ankle conspiracy running that deep? No, I do not.

But apparently even in Boston there are some who have been taken in by the libelous work of Baltimore beat writers and TV announcers. "That's not really blood," a guy next to me said to a little girl by his side. "Just ketchup." Then the two of them walked off.

I didn't say anything, but I can't front like it didn't help that he left right away.

***

That day in non-historical, non-mechanical Red Sox pitching was less inspired. After the exhibit, we headed to Maggiano's for dinner and then I caught the first seven innings of the Sox-Yankees game at my best friend K's house. I left when Javy Lopez relieved Tim Wakefield and blew his two-run lead before recording an out.

"I'd rather be on my way home to bed than sitting here watching the bullpen blow this one," I said on my way out. And then I did just that, skipping that entire excruciating extra-inning experience, and I'm still glad I did.

At the same time, I'm not glad that my prediction was right. I'm not glad that the bullpen door opening this year has become, to quote the Matrix, "the sound...of inevitability."

***

But just when you think it's that simple, the Sox come home and sweep the red-hot Twins--and do it mostly on the strength of their pitching, taking two of the three games of the series by a run. That's two back-to-back one-run wins that directly followed two back-to-back one-run losses at Yankee Stadium.

In the third game of the Minnesota series, Josh Beckett, the same guy for whom the Sox couldn't muster a third run in Houston, was showered with 18, making his five-run day look dominant by comparison.

At 34-11 on the season, the Red Sox have the best home-field record in the AL, and home cooking this week has shrunk the deficit in the AL East to two games.

But they're 21-29 on the road. And the key to last year's bullpen--Hideki Okajima--is a shadow of his 2007 self. And from what I've gathered watching the shows this week, nobody outside the Red Sox clubhouse, myself included, has really been able to figure out why.

June 16, 2007

If I were in Boston, I'd have seen Dave Roberts' full standing ovation a million times by now. But out here, without NESN, and without any video clip on NESN.com of the ovation (bad form, guys), I'm forced to settle for the abbreviated clip on MLB.com. It at least gives me some idea.

It seems the Sox followed my instructions to the letter last night. So here are some more. I hope today Barry Bonds goes ofer, but if he does hit a home run, the same throw-it-back instruction applies. I hope Dice sets 'em up and shuts 'em down. I hope JD Drew continues in the leadoff spot for the rest of this series, if not the season, and I hope that just once, our entire lineup could go off the way Kevin Youkilis, Jason Varitek, JD, Mike Lowell and Dustin Pedroia have separately in the last couple of weeks, but all at the same time. I hope Dave Roberts gets another ovation tonight from a new crowd--I hope he gets an ovation every time he pops his head out of the dugout. Words do not describe how much I love that man.

Also, I hope the FOX affiliate out here sees fit to show me the Sox game today, since it's supposed to be the Game of the Week, instead of some stupid Diamondbacks - D-Rays contest. Whoda thunk I'd ever be hoping to see Buck and McCarver?

P.S. Just saw the highlights for Pedroia, and the look on his little face after he hits that home run makes me want to squeeze him till he cries.

June 02, 2007

The Yankees proved yesterday that they were not going to be totally buried this weekend, but today saw first Mike Mussina and then Scott Proctor collapse, while in the Yankees' halves the area around first base it looked more like a football game or a biker brawl than baseball. Mike Lowell knocked Robinson Cano (Official Yankees Whipping Boy of this Series) right onto his ass but FOX informed us it was a perfectly legal move. I'm still scratching my head about that one.

There weren't as many HBP in this game--Scott Proctor, in fact, appears to still be most unsettled about what happened last night. I think it was in his head as he walked the house in a bottom of the seventh that got downright messy, with two errors by Jeter, five runs for the Red Sox, and a stomach-turning collision between Mike Lowell and Doug Mientkiewicz at first base.

Before that play, the goriest thing I'd ever seen on a baseball field was the collision between Johnny Damon and Damien Jackson in the ALDS against Oakland in 2003. This, in my opinion, was even more gut-wrenching to watch, as Mientkiewicz's head was snapped forward violently and then back again, and he flopped unconscious into the dirt facedown like a rag doll, laying there motionless for a few seconds.

Like Damon after the collision with Jackson, Mientkiewicz was carted off the field on a meat wagon, a familiar fixture in the NFL but something rarely seen on the baseball diamond. The FOX cameras zoomed in on Mientkiewicz's glassy eyes as they carried him past solemnly applauding fans, past the dugout, and out to the left-field garage door, where they exited to a waiting ambulance. Last reports were that Mientkiewicz was at MGH for "precautionary testing".

Of course we were treated to graphic slow-motion replays from multiple angles, all of which showed Mientkiewicz taking as hard a shot to the head as anyone I've ever seen in any sport, and unlike in other sports, Mientkiewicz didn't have on a helmet. In fact, in the chaos he'd lost even the flimsy protective layer of his canvas baseball cap.

I'll admit that at times this season it's seemed like Mientkiewicz has become Dark Parallel Universe Mientkiewicz, sneering, slobbering tobacco, and seeming generally unpleasant whenever we've seen him these past few months in his personal Pinstripe Hell. But he's still one of the 25, one of the faces pictured in both of the iconic final moments of the ALCS and World Series. And I don't care if it was A-Rod, I never want to see any player, on any team in any game, so terribly hurt.

We won and gained back the game we lost last night. We can still squash out their hopes of making this a race in the AL East tomorrow. But it's all a little hollow tonight--I just keep drifting back to wondering how Mientkiewicz is doing, if he'll be all right.

Update: Jeff Jacobs, Hartford Courant (link via comments at JoS): "Mientkiewicz was able to sit up as he was carted off the field. He was taken to Mass General, where tests revealed a mild concussion, cervical sprain and fractured bone in his right wrist. He will be placed on the disabled list today."

Awful, but probably not as horrific as it could have been. I was worried about bleeds in his brain--that impact was the equivalent of a car accident--and it had looked while he was being worked on on the field like something was wrong with his jaw. I'm not surprised about the injury to a vertebra, either--watching the replays, he very well could have out-and-out broken his neck. What can you do but hope he's better soon, and in the meantime is given all he can eat in powerful painkillers? From some of the comments I've read around the Web today, it seems Lowell feels completely awful about it, even though it wasn't his fault.

Trot Nixon's face in close-up on the TV screen, mouth open, shoulders heaving, sucking breath after his double to make the game 3-0, a sniffle and a wiggle of his pug-nose, a delicate little puff of condensation clouding around his face in the chilly October air.

It's strange, because Trot Nixon isn't really my favorite player, and not someone I take especial notice of this way, but he's burned into my brain now, and that memory of his face, panting after legging out his two-run double for the last RBI a Sox batter would earn in 2004, will probably be the first thing that pops into my head whenever anyone mentions the 2004 World Series, or even the 2004 Red Sox in general.

It's hard to know why this moment has stuck with me, or what real significance the memory of Trot's face has for me--memories are usually tiny things you attach subconscious tags to--remember this--along the way, something you consider significant before hindsight proves you right. I had no way to know that Trot's RBI would be the final men pushed across the plate until next year's Spring Training, and frankly, being the cynical New England fan that I am, I was worrying and hoping for more right up until Foulke was underhanding to Mientkiewicz.

It's funny, the things you remember.

Maybe it's just a sign of the way I got so into these guys, the fact that though I wouldn't consider Trot my favorite player, I have him and his face memorized, like all the rest--the kind of weird one-sided intimacy a fan has with each player in a year like this.

The Red Sox have their eras. Some of us are the Dewey Was My Favorite When I Was a Gawky Preteen generation. Some are the I Remember Fisk's Homah generation. Some are the I Idolized Yaz generation. And so forth.

There are kids right now who are the I Saw 'Em Win It All generation who'll someday wax nostalgic about the days of Trot Nixon, and his pine-tar filthy helmet, his crazy mohawk, inexplicable dugout gum-sniffing, and complete shit fits at umpires from the dugout that got him ejected from games he wasn't even playing in...

And one of them will say to the other, "Ya dood...those were the days."

For us...maybe we grew up in the Carlos Quintana Era, but we're also old enough to remember when the Trot Era ended, and they were officially all gone, another fistful of names: Nomar. Pedro. D-Lowe. How long before it's...allright, let's just stop right there.

Brr. Suddenly it feels chilly in here.

The real bitch of it, too, is that in the end, we left him. I know baseball teams are businesses and not charity organizations, and that this was a necessary move, but the guy's never worn any other uniform. Let's not pretend that on an emotional level this doesn't just suck, right out loud.

December 27, 2006

I didn't write anything when the Sox didn't take their option, and I didn't write anything when he didn't take his. Nor did I write anything when he filed for free agency or when the rumors about the Indians began to swirl. I guess I was waiting for there to be official confirmation he's in a new home, back out in the Midwest, which is where he had his first success (in Chicago). As Allen put it at Over the Monster, "the Indians...seem just about set to pick up a guy who's entirely qualified and due for a rebound year." And I hope it happens. Not so I can tell anyone "I told you so" but because I think Foulke deserves more moments in the sun.

I won't repeat myself. Everyone who's read this blog for longer than twenty minutes knows what I think about Foulke's tenure in Boston, his role in the World Series, and whose side I come down on post-World Series.

And I won't mope any more after this. I root for the laundry, and just yesterday I saw Jonathan Papelbon moose-hunting on NESN--I'm still rooted here for so many reasons I'm not even going to unrealistically expect myself to keep track of Foulke once next season gets into full swing and we're finding out what we've got with Matsuzaka and Papelbon in the rotation, etc. Just typing that makes me squirm around in my seat wanting it all to start now.

But right now it's a quiet moment in December. It's finally just started to get really cold around here for longer than a day at a time, a reminder that there's still the NFL playoffs and most likely several dozen feet of snow and all the slush and ice of January and early February to go before we can really get into the 2007 Red Sox. Right now I'm watching the man who once made all the difference walk on to greener pastures, and even though it's right, for me, it still stings.

November 18, 2006

The news to me is not that Bill Mueller has retired from playing--I thought that was a foregone conclusion after his knees flared up again early in the 2006 season. What's news to me is that he is immediately taking a front office job as a "special assistant" to the Dodgers' GM. I'm not sure if that is a real job or not--is it a cosmetic job? Something that keeps him on the team payroll for appearances and things like that? Or is he moving into the business of baseball, gunning for a GM or managerial job himself? What a pleasant surprise it would be if Buelly and his baby blues remained in baseball for a few more decades.

That said, today is not about baseball but football--college football, to be precise. I'm putting aside my general dislike for the college game to watch the cataclysmic Ohio State-Michigan contest today, because like an ALCS between the Red Sox and Yankees, it's an event that transcends sports. My dad is actually at the game today along with my sister and has already sent me an excited text message, which I'm sure is the first of many. I'll see if I can't get him to guest post sometime this week.

October 06, 2006

This is the first baseball postseason I've paid attention to in which the Red Sox did not play. It's an odd feeling. Like crashing a party where you weren't invited.

Last night Julia and I watched the Dodgers / Mets game. She paid attention to it more than I did--I kept watching a play here and there, and then losing interest. It was strange.

The plays I did watch, the ones I did pay attention to, though...and the players...it seemed like every one of them had a .300 batting average. Several catches right at the outfield wall kept the game excruciatingly (for the fans at Shea Stadium) scoreless for several innings. Tommy Glavine, who is from Billerica, and who at this point looks more like he should be in the broadcast booth than still pitching, spun a beauty for the Mets. It was a higher level of baseball than the one I'd been watching for the last couple of months, but I missed the Red Sox.

I am a Red Sox bigot. I will freely admit this. Those posters and postcards you sometimes see of the "view from Boston" where everything beyond Worcester is California and Japan are sometimes pretty close to my real worldview. I know players around the league in relation to what they have done for or against the Red Sox; I know teams in relation to how much or how little they challenge the Red Sox historically. What I remember about Carlos Beltran, for example, is the hot stove season in which the radio wires in Boston were aglow with buzz about acquiring him from the Houston Astros.

So there was, of course, Gump, and Nomar, and even Derek, chewing away on something in the Dodgers dugout. Pedro's sidelined. Tommy Glavine's from Billerica. Everyone else was a stranger to me. Well...except Buelly, who made a miraculous appearance at the dugout rail, curling his hands into his jacket sleeves and huddling into himself in the chilly autumn air. I'm sorry...you can't just take my Buelly away for months and months and then give me something like that all at once come October. That just ain't right.

We went out for a cigarette mid-game, and when we came back, it was the bottom of the sixth, bases loaded, two outs. The pitching coach and infielders were gathered around the Dodgers' relief pitcher Brett Tomko; sweat was pouring down his face. His sandy blonde hair was standing out from his neck in wet curls with all the sweat. He was puffing out his cheeks and blowing to try to calm himself, rubbing up the ball frantically.

Eventually, Tomko would be relieved (or not) by Mark Hendrickson, in my opinion a dead ringer for John Smoltz except without the same ability (at least last night) to get outs, the Mets would score two more runs, and that would essentially be the ball game. But it was that moment with Tomko, hyperventilating, hands working over the ball, he and everyone around him on the mound and everyone in the stands looking like they were going to blow chunks at any moment, that really made me feel acutely what I was missing.

Of course, things have been hectic and intense with me lately in virtually all other areas of my life. It's not good, it's not bad, but it's...a lot. A lot is going on right now, and it doesn't look to stop until November. I have to say the Red Sox may have done me a favor by making it so that I didn't have to add playoff baseball intensity, worry, aggravation, and sleeplessness on top of everything else.

Or as Julia put it, "It's good of the Red Sox to take some time off this year and let our ulcers heal over."

P.S. Please see also the footage linked here of Joel Zumaya's performance yesterday against the Yankees. I am hoping Sam is still alive after that game.

June 26, 2006

Another day, another walkoff hit by David Ortiz. And fortunately for me, I didn't witness Rudy Seanez's outing, or the home run Jonathan gave up to Chase Utley, which was about the cheapest homer possible at Fenway.

But it's with a heavy heart I fired up Typepad tonight, as it has been brought to my attention that...well...

Imagine your reaction if one of the foremost orthopedic doctors in the country asked you to purposely break your chronically balky knee in a last-ditch attempt to generate cartilage growth. And oh, by the way, it would take two years to recover.

Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Bill Mueller doesn't have to imagine it. Dr. Richard Steadman of Vail, Colo., examined Mueller's right knee and suggested a remedy that would effectively end the 35-year-old third baseman's career.

"It was heartbreaking that he didn't have the answer," said Mueller, a DeSmet High graduate. "It was very discouraging."

After three surgeries on the knee, it has almost no cartilage left. So even when he heals from the surgery he had last month, it is doubtful he will be able to play baseball.

"I can't even walk on it without it swelling up," he said.

Mueller will continue daily treatment, including walking in a swimming pool to reduce the weight he places on the knee. By the first week of July, the knee should have healed from the surgery and doctors can evaluate the amount of cartilage left. Options include cartilage replacement surgery and the radical surgery proposed by Steadman. Both procedures have low success rates.

"They really need to realign my leg by rebreaking it," he said. "But the cartilage might wear out as fast as it is generated."

The loss of Mueller, who is in the first year of a two-year, $9.5 million contract, is a big blow to the Dodgers. The career .291 hitter got off to a hot start and slowed when the knee began bothering him, batting .252 in 32 games. He led the American League in batting in 2003, when he hit .326 for Boston.

"It's very discouraging," Dodgers manager Grady Little said. "That's all it's been since he went down."

I don't really have much to say about it. Just sadness.

P.S. For a much better post on yesterday's game, head on over to Emma's. It's good to see her writing.

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